Is there coursework?

I try not to channel surf. As far as I'm concerned, you decide what you want to watch, you watch it, and you turn it off.

Should you occasionally lapse, you apparently run the risk of accidentally catching a few minutes of Channel 4's Sex Education Show, Tuesday night, 8pm, and if that doesn't cure you of the habit then nothing will. In this one, a class of kids were being shown pictures of Kelly Osborne, Chris Martin and Daniel Radcliffe, and being invited to guess at what age they lost their virginities. The correct answer was then revealed to a breathless world.

Wow. Is it actually written into their contract, do you think, that having Done the Deed our modern day teen idols are then obliged to make a public disclosure? Or if not public, then at least to Channel 4's researchers? Is there a register somewhere? Maybe a web page?

And no, I'm not revealing the answers.

I believe the point was to show young people that, look, you don't need to rip your pants off the moment you hit puberty and it is acceptable to wait a couple of days. It might have failed in that regard. Still, cudos to Chris Martin for (a) at least managing to last until he was out of his teens and (b) for not being famous at the time (based on the fact that "Trouble" came out in 2000 - oh dear lord, I can't believe I'm making this mental calculation. Stop it stop it stop it) and therefore possibly succeeding on the grounds of, I dunno, personality or even, who knows, a bit of affection and respect and mutual liking.

I can safely say Mr Martin's school didn't have classes like that - at least, it didn't 12 years earlier when I was there.

Lodged at John Mason

I like all the people I know who have come or are coming through John Mason school (age range of set: 15-42). And I liked the ones I met there today when I ran a couple of workshops in the library learning resource centre.

The do was arranged by Mark Thornton from Mostly Books and the librarian learning resource centrearian – all I had to do was turn up, while Mark lurked at the back and sold books in the break. And so I talked about worldbuilding in science fiction – not (necessarily) creating a whole new planet, but a background, a setting, that all the characters will consider totally normal but which has to be explained subtly to the reader. What, your soul doesn’t follow you around as a shapeshifting animal? Weirdo!

Ben’s clues for worldbuilding, many based on examples that I rejected for Big Engine:

• If you can remove the sf element and still have a story, it’s not sf. (1)
• You can’t change just one thing. There must be consequences to your change. (2)
• The world must make sense to the people in it. (3)
• There must be limitations to your world. (4)
• Only have other races if there is something about them that could never be human. (5)
• You're not limited by an effects budget in a book. Go mad!

There were 21 in the first group, 15 in the second; mostly year 9 with a scattering of 8 and 7. Quite a few girls turned up - in fact they were the majority in the second group, which I found very encouraging. Mary Shelley, Ursula le Guin – there’s a substantial female heritage to science fiction that gets ignored all too easily.

The learn- oh soddit library already has a copy of Wingèd Chariot. One boy decided he prefers the original title and the present cover: clearly a young man of great discernment. I explained to another boy that Time’s Chariot is a slightly rewritten and generally updated version of the former. ‘Why did you write the same book twice?’ he asked. ‘That’s just stupid.’

Bless.

Photos may follow.

Notes

1. Big Engine reject: a story that was allegedly on an alien world but was basically a 1930s Chicago gangster adventure, so should have been set in 1930s Chicago.
2. Big Engine reject: a world in which the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in nuclear war; 40 years later, background radiation is so high that the race can only breed by cloning. And yet everything else is the same as now: US still a superpower, no nuclear winter ...
3. Big Engine reject: the European parliament outlaws women, making all of Europe male and gay and reproducing by cloning. A fearless underground women’s resistance army is determined to smash the reproduction centres and make European blokes hetero again. This was meant to be a dire warning about the perils of ideology and cloning but ended as merely dire.
4. ‘Frodo, you must throw the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Now we’ll just ask the giant eagles to fly us down to Mordor and be home for tea.’
5. Elves add nothing!

School's in

When I blogged about last year's parent-teacher evening it drew a lot of Google searches for something completely different, due to my use of the word "threesome" and a word that almost rhymes with "thespian" in the same sentence.

No sign of them this year, though - or at least, the third person who made me wonder didn't seem to be around. It was obviously a year for shedding partners because for various reasons our own household's turnout was just me and, wonder of wonders, the actual Boy in question, the point of the whole thing, deigning to turn up so the teachers could deliver their opinions directly to him. Which may have slightly more effect than having their opinions filtered through the medium of me. I did get to see one lone father trailing round, all on his own and minus child, and it's a very forlorn sight.

This time the teachers were all sitting where they were meant to be and we actually mostly stuck to the timetable - it only began to slip about three teachers before the end.

Mrs A (maths, but doesn't teach him) is still multiply pierced, though her dress sense has toned down a little. Mr K (business studies), I finally decided about two hours later, reminds me of Jim's dad from American Pie but without the witty, dynamic sense of humour. Mr E (maths) thinks the Boy is the entire bee's anatomy and can't believe his colleagues in other subjects don't do likewise. Quite touching, really. Mrs K (English) couldn't believe she was sitting at the same table as a published novelist. Miss W (RE) looks about five minutes older than the Year 10s she teaches.

So, a good evening; maybe scope for future improvement but isn't there always; useful pointers for how this can be achieved. We celebrated with dinner from Domino's Pizza, which for some reason is considered a treat, probably because a pair of pizzas and a garlic mushroom starter costs half our average weekly shopping bill. Maybe he could consider that in his next Business Studies project.